The first thing to remember is that “it’s all about you.” That ‘you’ being your customer or potential customer. To drive demand for your product or service, you need to show that it’ll meet a customer need, solve a problem or answer a question for them.
To sell that solution, you need to understand your target audience. You have to build trust so that they buy into your value proposition. And you need to provide an exemplary customer experience to encourage them along the sales funnel.
Here, I’ll show you proven techniques to drive demand for your product or service. I’ll help you to focus your marketing efforts in the most effective places. This step-by-step guide shows how to drive demand and create marketing strategies that work.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
It’s not enough to sell the benefits of your product. You need to show its effects on your customer. Sell them the dream – how it will address their pain points, improve their lives and address customer needs.
L’Oreal don’t list the benefits of their beauty products, they praise their target audience with “Because you’re worth it.” Nike don’t list the properties of their trainers, they simply say, “Just do it” to encourage potential customers to buy into that active lifestyle. These brands understand their unique value proposition and communicate it well.
To do this, you need to conduct market research. Identify your target audience, their customer needs and where to find them. Tailor your marketing strategy to their needs and preferences. Which social media platform do they hang out on? If you’re attracting business owners or entrepreneurs with a B2B proposition, LinkedIn’s your best bet. But individual consumers looking for lifestyle products are more likely to be on Facebook, Instagram or Tiktok.
2. Drive Traffic to Your Website
Whether you’re a purely e-commerce driven online business or have a business website to promote your services, you need people to find it and engage with it. The most effective way to do this is with search engine optimisation (SEO) which makes your website easier to find via search engines.
- organic traffic won’t appear overnight, but is a key goal for a longer term SEO strategy. Discover the best search keywords to attract the right people. Use them strategically on service and product descriptions to drive new customers to your product pages and landing pages. Optimised article and blog pages can provide valuable information and help to build trust in your brand.
- paid traffic will ramp up awareness and boost visitors to your site with advertising on Google or social media. This is often a short term solution for a new product launch or specific promotion. The costs may be prohibitive for small businesses, but it could be an option for major events like an ecommerce business launch.
- referrals from social media channels or other websites are a great way to encourage your target market to visit your website. This is also a good SEO tactic as Google will take note of this activity too.
3. Provide Social Proof
Do you check customer reviews and testimonials before making a purchase? You’re not alone. It’s a key part of the customer consideration process, particularly first time buyers. People like the reassurance of hearing good things about a product or service before making a purchase. It helps you to appear more credible.
Leveraging social proof can significantly boost your product sales. Ask for customer reviews, gather feedback and comments. Place these testimonials on your website and make sure they’re visible.
Digital Market experts Gartner explain, “Online reviews are a powerful form of social proof, with 86% of businesses considering verified reviews critical in their purchase decisions.”
4. Grab Attention with Effective Content Marketing
You only get one chance to make a great first impression. The first time someone visits your website, you want to make a positive impact. You want new customers to believe you’re credible, trustworthy, professional, knowledgeable and worth engaging with. There are so many online businesses competing for your target audience’s attention, so you need to make sure your content engages them and makes them stop scrolling or browsing elsewhere.
High quality content: avoid sloppy mistakes like typos, broken links or missing images. It makes your business look unprofessional, less credible and less trustworthy. Create helpful, inspiring, valuable content. Google also prefers high quality content, so it’s a good tactic for SEO as well as for reassuring potential customers.
Answer customer questions: provide relevant, useful information that address target customer pain points, reflect customer needs and answer their FAQs. Highlight your USP, your value proposition, to explain why customers should choose you over your competitors.
Compelling call to action: tell people what you want them to do next. It could be to ‘find out more’, ‘contact us’, ‘sign up to email’ or ‘buy now’ for example. This is particularly important on landing pages and service or product pages.
Internal links: help your visitors to dive deeper into your website and look at more pages. Linking from one page to another encourages this and makes it easy for the user. You know how Netflix encourages you to watch ‘next episode’ and you end up binge watching an entire series. You want customers to do that on your website.
5. Engage Customers with Email Marketing
Email marketing is a smart digital marketing tactic for anyone from small businesses to big organisations. It’s a great way to communicate directly with your customer base. It’s a way to nurture customer relationships, build customer loyalty, provide valuable information and – the ultimate goal – drive sales.
Remember, not all customers are the same and could be at different stages of the customer journey. It’s important to talk to them differently and to send the most relevant content. With potential customers, you need to work hard to build trust and prove your integrity, especially when you want them to use their credit card on your site. Repeat customers may want to discover new products – and maybe loyal customers could hear about them first.
6. Apply Enticing Discounts
Who doesn’t love an exclusive gift or reward? Giving customers a priority discount is a wonderful incentive. Make sure it’s a limited number or time-specific offer to instil a sense of urgency and compel them to take action quickly. You could even have a pop-up countdown timer to reiterate the limited time and sense of urgency.
A personalised offer or discount is a powerful and persuasive marketing tactic. It can have a big impact on a purchasing decision. An exclusive discount can make a customer or potential customer feel valued and special.
7. Encourage Customer Loyalty
It’s not all about attracting new customers, it makes business sense to nurture long term relationships with repeat customers. Follow up after an initial purchase with incentives to keep them engaged.
Implementing a loyalty program or customer rewards system is another effective strategy to encourage repeat purchases. Major supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsbury’s offer ‘member prices’ to their loyal customers. Repeat customers who sign up to their loyalty program (Clubcard or Nectar) get preferential rates on many products – cheaper prices for them than for those without the membership card.
You could also reward customers for making referrals. If they introduce a friend to your brand, then they get a discount for example.
Case Study
“One of the main things was offering a money back guarantee. That definitely helped the business in terms of giving potential clients confidence that we’re going to deliver what we’re promising to deliver. That was definitely one of the biggest strategies that we put into place. It breeds confidence in a potential client coming to you.”
“My turnover’s increased by 40% since working with ActionCOACH… We’ve changed from a business that was almost at a standstill to one that’s growing every month.” Paul Cain, Cain & Beer.
Drive Demand for Your Products or Services
The first step towards getting someone to buy from you is to know who they are and what makes them tick. Once you know where to find them, how your offering can solve their problems and what you need to tell them to draw them over the line, you greatly improve your chances of making a sale. This 7 step strategy will boost your sales conversion rate and help you to connect with your target market.
And if you’d like to connect with me to get support and guidance through the process, please book in a free 30 minute growth session. I’m here to help you and your business.
